A New Kind of Woman in Politics

Clare Boothe Luce did not become famous through politics; rather, it was thanks in part to her preexisting fame that she won her seat in Congress in 1942. As a ten-year-old, she performed as a child actor on Broadway, thereby stimulating a passion that later became her first chosen career. Then, around 1919, in her late adolescence, another pathway opened. Her first political job was with the National Women’s Party working for the final passage of women’s suffrage. These mutual passions only began to merge in 1936, when Boothe Luce was at the peak of her first career as a Broadway playwright. Her play The Women debuted that year, offering audiences what seemed to be a light-hearted comedy in which a female cast shared their various infatuations with men. It became a massive hit, garnering her a handsome sum of $200,000. The play boasted not only a successful Broadway run, but also a second life as Hollywood’s second-highest grossing film in 1939.

Yet, part of the story’s power was its ability to deliver subtly political feminist sentiments, even if they were always delivered with light-hearted wit. This included Boothe Luce’s first articulation of the freedom to fly everywhere, though here with a more discernably feminist bent. At one point, the character Mary, played by Oscar-winning actress Norma Shearer in the film, pointedly quips, “These days, darling, ladies do all the things men do.” Then, in detailing examples, she provides a virtual resume of Boothe Luce’s life: “They fly aeroplanes across the ocean, they go into politics and business.” Herein lay the first merging of Boothe Luce’s various life commitments: to Broadway and politics, and to feminism and aviation. The freedom to fly everywhere in this iteration was part of a deeper aspiration for “ladies [to] do all the things men do.”²

While her aspiration may have been to equal men, Boothe Luce’s realist reflexes expressed themselves as she built a path from Broadway to politics. Indeed, she relied on a traditional patriarchal tool, marriage, to forge such opportunities for herself. Her 1929 divorce from her first millionaire husband provided her the seed money to move to Manhattan and set herself up as a career woman, where she served as managing editor at Vanity Fair magazine before making it big as a playwright. Her second marriage was even more lucrative and moved her even closer to politics. A mutual friend, Juan Trippe, the chairman of Pan Am, played matchmaker in 1935, when he introduced her to New York’s wealthiest and most eligible bachelor, Henry Luce. As the owner of two of America’s largest magazines, Time and Life, as well as other media holdings, Luce was exceptionally well connected in both political and economic circles. The two married just months later. They thereby became one of the United States’ first power couples, a husband and wife duo, both independently successful, who set aside family commitments in favor of mutually benefiting each other’s careers.

As World War II approached American shores, the Luces opted to turn their mutual gaze to politics. Henry delivered an even more famous political treatise than Clare’s 1943 speech on postwar aviation, at an equally momentous political moment. His famous open letter to the American people from early 1941—months before Pearl Harbor—pressed for the United States to enter the war on the Allied side and thereby to promote American values and ensure a century of American-led prosperity and peace. As Henry Luce urged then, “we can make isolationism as dead an issue as slavery, and we can make a truly American internationalism something as natural to us in our time as the airplane or the radio.”³ This was the opening foray in Clare’s political career as well, with the two thereafter strategizing on how she should effectively campaign for Congress to promote the views they held in common. His “American century” essay was effectively the opening statement in her electoral campaign; her February 1943 speech, which echoed her husband’s call for an American internationalism and fleshed out his enthusiasm for the airplane, was its culmination.

In between came the hotly contested 1942 election campaign, the first since Pearl Harbor forced the United States into the war. This was a time of acute crisis for the nation. It was also, however, a time of crisis for feminist politicians, and Clare Boothe Luce resolved to forge an entirely new model for women in politics, even though she shared the same Republican Party affiliation as the woman who set the original mold as the nation’s first Congresswoman back in 1916. She even shared a similar class standing as the famous Jeannette Rankin of Montana: both were economically privileged, though Rankin was part of a prosperous ranching family out West, while Boothe Luce married into wealth in the Northeast.

The main realm in which Clare Boothe Luce resolved to rewrite Rankin’s script for women politicians was national security. She strongly disagreed with Rankin’s pacifist views, which Rankin had fastidiously maintained since her vote in 1917 against America’s involvement World War I. Rankin based that decision on the idea that women by nature were inclined toward nonviolence, claiming, “I felt the first time the first woman had a chance to say no to war, she should say it.”⁴ Her vote garnered fervent allies in the women’s movement, of which both Rankin and Boothe Luce were committed members. Many such activists concurred with Rankin’s adherence to the philosophy of separate spheres, which held that women should use their public and political roles to promote the traditionally feminine tasks of caring for the needy, looking after the upbringing of children, and maintaining the peace. Men, in this worldview, would continue to wield society’s tools of national security and state-sanctioned violence.⁵ Rather than embrace the notion of separate spheres, Boothe Luce promoted an alternative feminist vision, one cheekily summarized in her blockbuster play: “These days, darling, ladies do all the things men do.”

The national mood had changed drastically between Rankin’s vote in 1917 and her second war vote on December 8, 1941, the day after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. This vote was calamitous for her political career, as she was the lone member of Congress to abstain from declaring war on Japan. The public threats of violence against Rankin and characterizations of her in the press as traitorous and naïve convinced her to never again stand for election. Yet, these same attacks only emboldened Clare Boothe Luce, a generation younger than her predecessor, to insist on forging a more hard-knuckled vision of women’s power on Capitol Hill. Boothe Luce wanted to win the open Congressional seat in Fairfield County, Connecticut, to break the male monopoly on making war and peace, and to acquire a seat for herself at the tables of power where military, economic, and technological policies were being crafted.

To counteract the public’s association of women with pacifism, Boothe Luce and her husband developed a strategy to bolster her national security credentials before the election. In early 1942 they flew aboard a Pan Am Clipper plane that had been requisitioned by the US military across the Caribbean to South America before crossing the Atlantic to the Allied front lines in North Africa. From there they flew along the front lines of the Middle East and Asia, ultimately crossing the Himalayas into Allied China. Henry hired his wife to write dispatches from the front—interviews with generals, updates of troop deployments, profiles of the various politicians keeping the Allied effort together—which were then published in Life magazine. Her national security bona fides were thereby impressively polished, allowing Boothe Luce, in extreme contrast to Rankin, to come to Congress as a hawk. She promised to be an aggressive voice against the New Deal at home and fully engaged on national security issues abroad. She even used her and her husband’s extensive connections to secure a position on the House Committee on Military Affairs, becoming the first woman to serve in any sort of national security policymaking position in Congress.⁶

Boothe Luce’s Embrace of the Cartography of Colonialism

For her first speech in Congress, it is not surprising that Boothe Luce selected a tone that established her differences with previous congresswomen and her ability to equal or surpass her male peers in both articulating national security concerns and pressing aggressive ad hominem political attacks. Her expertise with managing media also primed her well to draw headlines in hundreds of the following day’s newspapers. While the title of her address was cerebral, “America in the Post-War Air World,” her Broadway-honed rhetorical style enraptured the assembled crowd. This included a fellow anti–New Dealer, the Southern Democrat Edward Cox of Georgia, who followed her to the House podium and gleefully remarked, “I desire to make the observation that the very brilliant and statesmanlike address just delivered by the gentlewoman from Connecticut has been well worth the day that many in the gallery and on the floor have spent waiting to hear it.”⁷

In terms of content, Boothe Luce conveyed an awareness that the eventual conclusion of World War II would result in a massive expansion of civil aviation, one which, in her assessment, must be harnessed to an American internationalist economic and foreign policy. She began by articulating her topic’s importance for the future of the United States: “This I know[:] that the airplane has been the most dynamic instrument of this war and that the airplane will surely be the most dynamic instrument of the peace.” She then shifted to the Roosevelt administration’s postwar planning, already revving up in early 1943, and her concern that New Dealers were steering postwar civil aviation strategy in a direction in which “America can lose the peace.”⁸ For her, American predominance in postwar aviation was not only good for the United States, but it was also the surest guarantor of worldwide peace: “Make no mistake; I believe that we should maintain our position of international civil air supremacy for the greatest and best of all reasons: Our responsibility to the whole world and to ourselves, to assume democratic political leadership in this hemisphere and cooperate elsewhere with the United Nations in leadership, requires and demands a commensurate civilian air position.”⁹ With this as a preamble, she then proceeded to advocate for “keeping America on wings all over the world.”

The real reason for Clare Boothe Luce’s high-profile intervention was to thwart a rival postwar vision for aviation that risked undermining the Market Empire–supporting aviation system that she favored and jeopardizing American airlines’ global predominance. She and the corporate interests that had her ear were particularly worried about ideas voiced by Roosevelt’s then–vice president, Henry Wallace. The more progressive and more globalist Wallace had raised the possibility of opening all the world’s skies and airports to any nation’s airlines, matching the shipping world’s freedom of the seas, which allowed ships from any country to use any port.¹⁰

Thus, after opening her speech by praising aviation’s ability to counter American isolationism and voicing her embrace of the youthful freedom to fly everywhere, Boothe Luce then shifted gears from idealistic to acerbic and called out the vice president by name. Wallace and others in the Roosevelt administration, whom she labeled as “all-out post-war cooperationists,” were seeking to forge a postwar order for aviation that overlooked the vast differences between the United States, Britain, and the USSR: “In a noble effort to formulate some master plan and some master economy which will cozily embrace not only our own capitalistic democracy but the British Empire and its colonial system, and Russia and its totalitarian system, the all-out post-war cooperationists have begun to shoot the works, at least verbally, for a bigger and redder and more royal New Deal for the whole world.”¹¹ In her most memorable rhetorical flourish, Boothe Luce added: “But much of what Mr. Wallace calls his global thinking is, no matter how you slice it, still ‘globaloney.’”¹² Her phrasing elicited raucous laughter in the House chamber and became rich fodder for newspaper headlines around the country the next day, most of which belittled Wallace’s views and lionized Boothe Luce’s muscular appeal to American strength.

To rally broad-based support for her more nationalist and protectionist vision of aviation, Boothe Luce also stressed how Wallace’s views would effectively surrender American sovereignty over its own airspace. At one point she turned to an unnamed colleague from Kansas and evoked a menacing prospect under Roosevelt and Wallace. She described a future airport in Wichita, or perhaps greater Kansas City, dominated by foreign aircraft:

And yet, … shall I stand on a plain in the heart of the gentleman from Kansas’ fair land, in the year 1949, and see at the great central terminus that may be there the air liner Queen Elizabeth put in, the Stalin Iron Cruiser, the Wilhelmina Flying Dutchman, the Flying de Gaulle, the airships of all the nations on earth—perhaps even those of the German and Jap. But shall I scan, like Sister Anne, the skies in vain, searching for the shape of an American Clipper against the clouds?¹³

Deploying a casual racism that undercut her own larger commitments to globalism, Boothe Luce reassured the nation’s instinctive isolationists that her brand of American internationalism would safeguard national security, while also validating jingoistic notions of national supremacy. She then concluded her speech by paraphrasing Winston Churchill and his prioritizing of national self-interest: “We, gentlemen, were not elected by our constituents, on either side of this aisle, to preside over the liquidization of America’s best interests, either at home or abroad.”¹⁴ For Boothe Luce, it was clear that “America’s best interests” were not found in Wallace’s views. Instead, America’s crafting of postwar aviation must “only be determined from the standpoint of what the American people believe is their real, their practical, self-interest” and not “based upon emotional altruism nor sentimental aspiration.”¹⁵

For Boothe Luce, the choice was clear: postwar aviation should primarily transpire on American aircraft, with American pilots, and with ticket revenue going to American airlines. She framed this vision while looking forward to the novel security exigencies that would predominate after the war. Nonetheless, this forward-looking stance justified her advocacy for turning global aviation backward to the status quo ante of the 1930s. Then, too, most air traffic utilized American aircraft, with almost all the rest on Western European carriers. The United States’ advantage before the war was indeed substantial, as she makes clear: “For the record, let us note that in October 1941 our American system’s Pan American Airways route-miles were roughly two and one-half times greater than B.O.A.C.—British Overseas Airways Corporation. We had 99,000 miles of route as against the British system’s 39,000… . In early 1939, before the outbreak of the war, Pan American was flying more air miles than all the major European countries put together.”¹⁶ If Boothe Luce’s views were to prevail, which they ultimately did, this same cartography of colonialism would return and expand after World War II.

There was, however, one major difference from America’s prewar dominance under the cartography of colonialism and its postwar dominance under a similar, resuscitated cartography. Before the war, air routes established by the West’s great legacy airlines were very much embedded in the reality of imperialism. Through the 1930s they replicated earlier shipping routes and had the same purpose: to link far-flung colonies to their imperial metropoles. After the war, as Immerwahr’s work establishes, the Clare Boothe Luces of the United States had no desire to retain an empire in the traditional sense. Instead, they aspired to forge what he calls a “pointillist empire”—a network of control that built out important nodes from colonialism’s transportation infrastructure, while simultaneously ceding political and military control of the hinterlands to local authorities.

The postwar pointillist empire enabled the United States to become the first Western power to both decolonize, when it gave up the Philippines in 1946, and simultaneously to grow in global clout thanks to its increasing control over important points in the global trade system. These points that the United States nurtured around the globe were always cities containing ports and/or airports, from which American political representatives, companies, and banks could administer American expansion more widely. While some were bolstered with an American military presence (Honolulu, Panama, Manila, Seoul), others were exclusively economic “emporia,” as Victoria DeGrazia calls them. Cities like Hong Kong, Singapore, and Beirut (except during brief military occupations in the 1950s and 1980s) fit this economic model.¹⁷

In short order, America’s leading airlines bolstered their fleets and expanded their route networks to serve as the sinews holding together these various points of influence. Of course, there was competition from Europe’s imperial states to provide this connectivity. After the damaging experience of war, these countries were much more invested than the United States in restoring their imperial grandeur. In their efforts to reassert control over their Asian colonies after Japanese occupation, they quickly restored their airlines’ prewar routes to Hong Kong (served by Britain’s BOAC, the successor to its original—and aptly named—flag carrier, Imperial Airways), Hanoi (Air France), and Batavia/Jakarta (KLM [Koninklijke Luchtvaart Maatschappij voor Nederland en Koloniën]). Yet, despite the competitive advantage Europe’s airlines enjoyed due to prewar know-how on these routes, they were quickly overtaken by Pan Am and newcomer Trans World Airlines (TWA).

Thanks to the massive wartime enlargement of America’s aerial resources, both these airlines expanded across the Atlantic, through the Mediterranean, and onward to Asia. Pan Am’s footprint was the biggest, as it became the first airline to initiate a round-the-world route in 1947. The route began with a New York–London flight, then puddle jumped through Western Europe before making it to Istanbul and the Middle East. At this stage, Pan Am’s route mimicked those of the Western European airlines noted above, following BOAC’s route to Hong Kong most closely. Beyond Hong Kong, Pan Am’s planes continued along the transpacific route first forged in 1936, ending in San Francisco.

In the aftermath of her well-received speech, Clare Boothe Luce’s vision of a confined cosmopolitanism—of a globalism built upon the freedom to fly everywhere, but always forging an American sphere of influence—became orthodoxy in Washington. It particularly shaped the United States’ maneuverings at the International Civil Aviation Conference that took place in Chicago in 1944, resulting in an agreement for international air travel still in effect today that locked in American airlines’ preexisting advantages from before and during the war.¹⁸

American Internationalism Takes Flight

Boothe Luce’s speech in February 1943, replete with its warm reception from the press and a broad anti–New Deal coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats, galvanized opposition to Wallace’s views on aviation. For a variety of reasons not pertaining directly to aviation policy, President Roosevelt marginalized his vice president after February 1943, to the point that Wallace was dropped from the ticket in 1944 and replaced by the more conservative Harry Truman. Meanwhile, the administration’s point people for aviation endured similar turnover. Most importantly, Adolf Berle, a longtime trusted adviser to Roosevelt, was placed in charge of civil aviation matters in 1944, and he hewed closely to Boothe Luce’s American internationalist views.

Berle’s new responsibilities for US civil aviation policy placed him in command of the US diplomats who assembled representatives from fifty-four nations in Chicago in November 1944 for the International Civil Aviation Conference, which set the ground rules for the global postwar aviation industry. By this time, Berle and other key members of the Roosevelt administration were strongly committed to reviving the prewar International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) along lines that were favorable to US carriers. Most importantly, any notions of freedom of the skies were sidelined at the Chicago Conference.

Rather than cooperative models that would have managed global aviation either as an internationally regulated public utility or, analogous to seafaring, as a democratized competitive market with all the world’s airlines flying wherever they chose, the prewar system was restored. As the historian Alan Dobson chronicles, the Chicago conference reestablished the prewar principle that the sky over a nation’s land was proprietary territory of that nation. As a result, protectionism predominated in all domestic aviation markets: these routes were left to national governments to distribute as they saw fit, meaning that they almost always remained the exclusive purview of a state’s own airline(s). Importantly, the largest domestic aviation market in the world, the United States, thereby remained exclusively in American hands. On international routes, like before World War II, there would also be no freedom of the skies. These routes would be established in state-to-state bilateral treaties, with further permissions required from states over whose territory aircraft flew. Once established by such treaties, these routes were also the proprietary possession of each state, not an international system.

A system of bilateral treaties suited the United States government and its airlines, since these two entities worked together to exercise their sizable advantages over the states they negotiated with. In its prewar dealings with Latin American and Asian governments, the tandem of State Department diplomats and Pan Am executives effectively deployed the United States’ economic and political clout and Pan Am’s technological superiority to strike deals that established American aerial dominance. This disproportionate leverage was also evident during the first postwar bilateral negotiations under the Chicago system, at the Bermuda Conference in 1946 between the United States and United Kingdom. Even though BOAC was the largest non-American airline, it could not match Pan Am’s capacity to service the myriad potential routes up for negotiation between American airports and either mainland Britain or Britain’s various colonies in the Caribbean, Asia, and Africa. BOAC simply did not have the aircraft or personnel to match Pan Am’s arsenal. Moreover, the British government was also still financially dependent on American money, both for its wartime borrowing and its postwar reconstruction needs. Thus, negotiations at Bermuda took place on an unlevel playing field that heavily favored the Americans.

The resulting compromise saw both American gains and modest British success at maintaining at least formal parity between the two aviation rivals. On the one hand, the final terms of the Bermuda Agreement did reconfirm the prewar era’s core principle that instilled a de jure equality into bilateral aviation agreements. This was the principle of reciprocity, under which each country typically designated the same number of national airlines (usually just one per country) to fly each route, generally with the same number of weekly flights per airline.¹⁹ Yet, on the other hand, the British were forced to accept a massive expansion of Pan Am’s routes in British-administered territory, including a push into parts of the British Empire where Pan Am had never flown before. Most importantly, the American airline now gained access to routes in British-held parts of the Middle East and South Asia so that it could initiate its 1947 round-the-world flights. Because British negotiators acquiesced on this count in the face of determined American pressure, the smaller and weaker BOAC had to compete with Pam Am for passengers all the way from London to Hong Kong.

The Bermuda Agreement became the postwar era’s precedent for future bilateral air agreements. First, it enshrined the principle of reciprocity as sacrosanct, but second, it also confirmed that the United States would negotiate aggressively to ensure that its airlines gained the advantages they needed to predominate. Thereafter, even when negotiations rendered an equal distribution of flights on a particular route, American carriers typically enjoyed an advantage. When customers were given the choice between a successful and deep-pocketed American airline and a smaller national start-up, they tended to opt for the American airline. In marketing campaigns through the 1950s, Pan Am wisely promoted itself as “The World’s Most Experienced Airline,” highlighting its edge in safety, reliability, and in-flight service.²⁰

Clare Boothe Luce was a bit disingenuous in her speech regarding international competition. She claimed to both envision and desire stiff competition, singling out BOAC in particular: “I have every desire to see the British Overseas Airways Corporation shoving us so closely in many regions of the world.” She also accepted the need for some sort of niche for other nations’ airlines, saying, “I have every hope that the air commerce of all the United Nations will expand constantly.” However, she failed to envision how this would occur, whether under American suzerainty or in competition with its airlines.²¹

As an ardent anti-communist, Boothe Luce envisioned no role in global aviation for the USSR or the other socialist states like Yugoslavia that would soon be established in Europe’s East. On this topic, she claimed only: “I can muster that there is a vast area of specific war and peace aims which can never be clarified, stated or proposed, and certainly not enjoined upon the world, until we know what goes on in the mind of Joseph Stalin.” Various aspects of postwar planning, she added, “all await the ukase of the master of Moscow and the gallant conqueror of Stalingrad.”²² As though living up to their characterization as unpredictable, the Soviets were last-minute no-shows to the Chicago conference in November 1944, and they refused to sign the final treaty. As such, the Soviets exiled themselves from the Chicago aviation system, having determined that this scheme would too blatantly serve American economic and political interests. They also forced all but two of their soon-to-be satellite states, Poland and Czechoslovakia, to disconnect from the international aviation system.²³

As a result of the Chicago system, the postwar aviation world reinscribed the prewar political and economic inequalities between the North Atlantic region—with the United States predominant—and the rest of the world. In one of the Cold War’s worlds, the West, aviation expanded at a dizzying clip, fueled mainly by domestic expansion in the United States and increased frequencies between Europe and New York City. New York–London quickly became, as it is today, the world’s most lucrative international route, but it was soon complemented by routes between New York and almost every other Western European capital. Thanks to the principle of reciprocity, Western European airlines added their own transatlantic routes, complementing service from Pan Am and TWA. By the late 1950s, the tarmacs of New York City’s Idlewild Airport, renamed after 1963 to honor John F. Kennedy, contained a colorful cornucopia of airplane liveries from across Western Europe and the United States.

Yet, except for a smattering of South American airlines (Varig of Brazil or Avianca of Colombia, for example), the pre-jet aviation years saw no carriers from Europe’s East or the Global South enter the United States.²⁴ Given that fact, the primary subjects of this book—Yugoslavia and Jamaica—were consigned to positions of aerial inferiority. Neither place was destined to become a vital node in the United States’ growing pointillist empire—nor did the United States necessarily desire that they should. Nonetheless, both states saw a sizable uptick in American economic trade and political influence during the Cold War. Jamaica had already been part of America’s banana empire for decades, with the Boston-based United Fruit Company playing an outsized role in land ownership in and shipping to Jamaica. The British colony became even more vital to the United States in the 1950s when bauxite, the raw material required for aluminum, began to be mined there. Yugoslavia, meanwhile, became an American partner only after Stalin’s decision to disown Tito in 1948, at which point the United States agreed to bankroll the country in the hopes that other communist satellites would follow its example and break with the Soviet Union.²⁵

Thereafter, at least from an American perspective, these two states held similar places in the pointillist-imperial landscape: the United States could best administer its growing economic and political ties with these states from other more important nearby regional hubs. For Jamaica, this meant that American interests handled their affairs, largely from Havana (before 1959), Miami, or Panama. For Yugoslavia, Frankfurt or Munich would suffice—with an assist from Switzerland’s Zurich. If Clare Boothe Luce were running aviation policy in these regions, she would have recommended running Pan Am routes from these more vital hub cities to the countries in question and let that be that. Never would these states have hosted economic and aviation hubs of their own, especially not with air routes that connected them to alternative points on the globe that did not align with American or Western European capital flows.

Under Boothe Luce’s ideal scenario, these regions would have seen a return to conditions from the 1930s. In Jamaica’s case Pan Am initiated service to Kingston early in the decade with great fanfare, as Charles Lindbergh piloted the first “flying boat” to land in Kingston Harbor. Yet, once these festivities passed, a more mundane reality took hold, in which Kingston served as little more than a refueling point and an overnight port of call. A few nights a week, Pan Am’s passengers deplaned and spent the night in the stylish Myrtle Bank Hotel, while a team of technicians serviced and refueled the plane and a steward replenished provisions for the onward journey. For the crew and almost all passengers, Jamaica was not the ultimate destination; the voyage continued further south to the strategically valuable American-administered Canal Zone in Panama or the lucrative commercial centers of Barranquilla, Rio de Janeiro, and Buenos Aires.²⁶

Meanwhile, Yugoslavia in the prewar years did have a veneer of aerial independence. A Belgrade-based airline named Aeroput initiated flights in 1928, mostly with a domestic net to link larger cities like Zagreb and Sarajevo to Belgrade. Additionally, a precursor of Air France was stopping in Belgrade on its route, which mimicked the tracks of the Orient Express from Paris to Istanbul, as early as 1923. Especially because Aeroput also flew a few international routes to nearby commercial centers—Venice, Thessaloniki, and Prague were its furthest destinations—Belgrade was a crossroads of sorts for early aviation, even as its overall connectivity lagged behind cities further west. Nonetheless, getting from Belgrade to points further afield was better managed on Europe’s great colonial-era airlines: Britain’s Imperial Airways (which later rebranded as BOAC) stopped there occasionally on its route between London and Delhi, as did KLM on its flights between Amsterdam and Batavia (Jakarta). Deutsche Luft Hansa’s flights also stopped there on routes between Germany and Athens or Istanbul. Thus, as with Jamaica, Yugoslavia was barely a destination in itself under the cartography of colonialism.

Befitting their status as overlooked aviation societies, these case studies were largely absent at the Chicago conference, though there is a caveat: a Yugoslav delegation was present, but it consisted of low-level officials headed by the Chicago-based consul general. The delegates’ assignment came from the royal Yugoslav government-in-exile in London, not from Tito’s communist-led Partisans, who were gaining ground in Yugoslavia and growing quite effective at governing the territory outside the king’s purview. The lack of clarity regarding which entity was Yugoslavia’s rightful government led to the erratic decision to send delegates to Chicago but not to sign the final treaty. When Tito’s communists won elections in late 1945 and became Yugoslavia’s sole governing authority, the choice not to sign the treaty was reaffirmed.²⁷

Jamaica, meanwhile, had no representation, either at the Chicago conference or at the 1946 Bermuda Conference. As a colony, it lacked legal standing at international conferences. While home rule developed during and after the war, these London-approved experiments extended only to domestic policies. Thus, even though the Chicago conference set the parameters for air travel in Jamaica and the Bermuda Conference determined which American and British airlines would fly there, diplomats reached these decisions based on the needs and interests of London, not Kingston. In this respect, Jamaica’s plight was no different than all the other soon-to-decolonize areas of the Global South. The Chicago system made no provision for them until independence, meaning that the 1944 meeting saw only limited participation from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. From Africa came just a handful of independent states (Egypt, Ethiopia, Liberia, and South Africa); South and Southeast Asia were similarly overlooked (only Nationalist China, Thailand, colonial India, and the still-colonized Philippines participated); and the Caribbean was sparsely represented as well (with only Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba present).²⁸

For Boothe Luce and America’s airline boosters, excluding communist states and subjugating colonies’ interests were acceptable aspects of the Chicago system. Eastern Europe showed little economic promise for routes stretching beyond what soon became the Iron Curtain. Meanwhile, America’s success in bargaining for more routes with the British at the Bermuda Conference established London as a pliant partner, akin, at least in this limited way, to small postcolonial states. Thus, for the time being, the realities of the resuscitated cartography of colonialism meshed with the new realities of the Cold War. Only one of the Cold War worlds—the West—had airlines that were robust enough to expand broadly, which they did, at least to other destinations in the West and Global South. Europe’s East was left outside this international system. Meanwhile, as long as it lasted, colonialism assured that aviation growth in the Global South was left for American airlines to dominate, with lesser-funded Western European carriers competing as they could.

No matter how much her speech elicited cosmopolitan yearnings—especially the aspiration to fly everywhere—Clare Boothe Luce’s actual recipe for postwar aviation was decidedly parochial. In fact, her speech was effective in preventing postwar aviation and its passengers from achieving this lofty aspiration. Stressing what she saw as irreconcilable differences between the Allied powers, she accepted that the postwar world would be divided. Thus, instead of enabling a globally connected world via aviation, these divisions, as Boothe Luce already perceived in 1943, was likely to leave Europe’s East excluded from this aviation system and the Global South’s aviation resources built up only around certain points of American interest. Rival visions that might have enabled truly universal connectivity, whether through managing aviation as a collective global utility or opening all the world’s airports to global competition, were dismissed in Boothe Luce’s rendering as “globaloney.”

As small states with little potential to become hubs of American interest, both post-1948 Yugoslavia and postindependence Jamaica had strong incentives to fight back against the return of the West’s cartography of colonialism. Their opposition had slightly different ideological roots, with Yugoslavia driven by nonalignment and Jamaica by postcolonialism. After being disowned by Stalin, the Yugoslav government fought fiercely to forge an independent position between the rival blocs in the Cold War. It ultimately found common cause with certain countries in the Global South who felt similarly compromised when forced to choose between the Americans’ or Soviets’ cumbersome conditions for support. Meanwhile, Jamaica’s government was driven less by Cold War frustrations and more by its push to nurture its economic and political sovereignty after three centuries of British imperialism.

Whatever their motivations, each government ultimately shared common desires in their aviation policies. They perceived the West’s attempts to resuscitate and expand the cartography of colonialism as inimical to their own economic progress and their political independence. After all, returning to the prewar status quo would have meant retaining the deficiencies in these countries’ transportation connectedness to the larger world; enriching Western airlines and stockholders whenever their own citizens flew; and keeping the highly skilled and well-paying jobs of piloting, in-flight service, and aircraft maintenance in Western hands.

To wage this fight, the governments of both Yugoslavia and Jamaica used the only good tool offered in the Chicago system. Even smaller and poorer states that possessed airlines of their own had the power to insist on reciprocity rights when negotiating bilateral air agreements. This limited right to be treated equally, if used creatively, could then allow even a small airline belonging to a small country to design its own aerial cartography—to help move their home countries from the periphery of the cosmopolitan world closer to its center. In the process, these airlines could also foster much-needed economic growth, either as a booster of exports or as a vehicle to deliver foreign tourists. As such, both postwar governments created airlines of their own, with Yugoslavia’s JAT Airways founded in 1947 and Air Jamaica established in the half decade after independence in 1962. These were expressions of opposition from Europe’s East and the Global South to Clare Boothe Luce’s too-parochial vision for postwar aviation.